Circles
by Dana Woods
Summary: It's a circle. It all comes round again and again. FutureFic.


Title: Circles

Rating: PG

Characters: Angel, Dawn

Timeline: Post-Not Fade Away

Disclaimer: Characters/Concepts of Buffy and Angel belong to Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, et al.

Dawn is wiser now, and it shows in her eyes. She sees Glory and the First and a million other things when she looks in the mirror. Sees what she took away from all of those experiences.

She's older now, too, but that doesn't show anywhere. The Key is eternal, and no one ever gave much thought about what that meant for Dawn. She's died six times so far. None of them took. All of them resulted in a burst of green light that exploded outwards from her corpse, then collapsed back into the form of a very alive, shaking and naked body of Dawn.

The first three times she came back twelve--the age the monks originally made her. The last three, she exerted some influence at the right moment and was nineteen again. Got the knack of influence all the way right on the fifth try and now she's perpetually nineteen, because it's a good age--looks and energy and vitality and a sense of hope that she figures has to be a product of nineteen year old brain chemicals, because it doesn't go away, no matter how much time passes.

She's wiser now and everyone who used to be important to her is dead now.

Mom. Buffy. Willow. Giles. Xander. Kennedy. Vi. Faith. Andrew. Buffy, the second and final time. Too many Slayers to count. And Spike, too. He died in his sleep sixty years after he Shanshued.

It's Dawn and Angel now. Has been for the last forty years, and sometimes Dawn wishes she could get the nerve to stake him in his sleep. She has access, after all.

He stalked her for ten years and even though Angel-stalking isn't frightening or--after a few years--creepy, after a decade of Angel inhabiting the shadows around her passed, she laid down the law.

Brought him home with her. Brought him back to life, he says.

She gets what he means by that. He lost everyone, too. The last was the hardest him. Illyria held the remaining shreds of Fred in her, and when she was gone so was everything for him.

Which Dawn figures is what brought him to her shadows. They had a two-degrees of separation history, but it was more than Angel had with anyone else. She thinks he's melodramatic with the "back to life" stuff, but she'll admit that she did bring him back to the land of the living.

So, it's kind of funny that she sometimes wants to creep down the hall to his bedroom and stake him. But his stasis reminds her of her own, and sometimes that becomes too much to take.

It's a Dawn thing, not an all around immorality thing. Because Angel finds comfort from her lack of change. Gets fidgety and out of sorts for a while when she gets her haircut. Went a little violent-type-crazy when she mentioned letting herself age one time. He stormed out, took out a dozen vamps and demons in Chicago, then came home and told her to go ahead.

Dawn had rethought it at that point. It seemed like a tease, letting herself get older. Made her worry that she'd start to think she was normal, that she'd forget she wasn't really growing older. Figured it would lead to all sorts of insanity and outraged bitterness.

It was the lesser of two evils. And if Angel lets himself think that Dawn finds the same comfort he does in the lack of change, of aging, of different, then he might as well tell himself that he can go strolling through the park at noon, he's that wrong,

This seemingly never ending life she's slated to live sometimes sends her up to the attic (not the basement; that's where the demonic immortal types get their crazy on) and she spends days with seven one-hundred watt bulbs burning bright overhead (because darkness is also for demonic immortal types). Angel brings her food and she eats it because she knows from experience that he'll use his strength to hold her down and force-feed her.

She doesn't sleep, and those books are right when they say that a person goes a little crazy after three days of no sleep. They go even crazier after nine days, and learning that was what lead her to her sixth death at Angel's hands. She doesn't blame him, because sitting at the top of the stairs at the Slayer house in Budapest with a rifle, taking careful aim at hearts is worth a death.

The Slayers haven't much trusted her since then, even though she moved to the North American HQ in Chicago and the Council swore they wouldn't let the information slip from their mouths. They didn't say anything about the Slayers' mouths, though, and Dawn knows too well how they talk amongst themselves. The Sisterhood, and all that.

They give her sideways looks now, and they tell her good-night in pointed voices and wait for her to leave her office, watch her get in her car and drive towards the house she shares with Angel. He says he hears one or another in the yard at all hours of the night, checking for signs of her being awake, and Dawn's pretty sure that they've set up a rotating schedule for it.

She's thinking about calling a meeting and reminding them that there's no insanity until the third night of sleeplessness, so maybe they'd be better off checking on her every other night. Save themselves a half hour of patrol time. Maybe they'll even listen.

Probably not, because Dawn would be the first to tell them that she hasn't come up with another coping mechanism yet--the make-do scenario at the moment is Angel dragging her out of the attic after two days. He offered to rig up a cage in their basement. Said it would make feeding her a lot easier. She threw a knife at him and glared at him for the rest of the day. But she's thinking about it, which says a lot about how far she's come from Sunnydale Dawn.

As if she wasn't already far enough away.

There are anniversaries of deaths every month, so Dawn only takes a moment on the one-year markers for everyone. After that, things start to blur. Names on headstones get remembered with the wrong faces. That happens with the Slayers a lot. She hopes she doesn't live so long that it happens with her extended family, but she thinks she might, because the Council has yet to find any details on how she might be made fully mortal and she doesn't get neat perks like a photographic memory.

Angel's always known, somehow, about that fear. He sketches for her, has done it since before he came to inhabit her shadows, much less her life. There are scenes and images that happened when Buffy and the others were in high school; times he had with them that she never did. It gives her new moments with them, and she kind of gets teary whenever he leaves one on her desk for her.

Sometimes she tells him about things that happened when he wasn't around. Says things like, "And Xander had that 'I don't know anything, don't ask me, panicking now' look of his, but Willow did that thing with her forehead--you know, the cute one? Buffy just kind of blinked. Like you don't already know that Giles was cleaning his glasses."

Gives him the setting, down to where everyone was sitting, and a month will go by, maybe more, but she'll come home and find a drawing of the scene waiting for her in some unexpected place. And he always gets it right. Always. Because he knew them too, and when she looks at those drawings, she does more than get a little teary. She downright cries, which is a rarity for her nowadays.

She cries because she knows she didn't get it right, that she's already forgetting. She's filled in missing details with her knowledge of them. The fact is, she doesn't remember what Xander was doing in the least when Buffy wondered why one of the Slayers was so upset that a man asked her for a snowball. In fact, she's not even sure it was a snowball, just that it was some innocently named sexual thang that Buffy was clueless about.

There are times when Angel draws his Los Angeles people into recent events. In recent settings. Those are his way of dealing, she thinks. And she asks him to tell her why Gunn is rolling his eyes, or Cordelia is grinning. And she dutifully doesn't flip through the book of still shots of Fred and Illyria that she knows, were she to flip, would reveal an animated shift from one to the other. Well, actually, she doesn't do it when he's around to watch, because someone else witnessing the private moments of your dysfunction is surreal, as she well knows.

They use the names of friends long gone to identify like people in this life. Short-hand summations of a multitude of personality traits and predicted outcomes of time. When everyone else was astounded that some vapid Watcher truly stepped up to the plate, it was Dawn and Angel to the side, remembering that they called a "Cordelia" two years before

If there's insanity brought on by her stasis of form, there's comfort from having someone to share the memories, the moments.

They're not entirely gone and lost to the past. Looking at the big picture that is Dawn, that is Angel, that is Angel and Dawn, the past has only a small portion of them, relatively speaking. One of the more important parts, sure, but still small overall.

With the Wolfram and Hart choice long behind Angel, and with no other similar ones made after, the Council didn't have a problem with Angel partnering with Dawn. They might have, but Dawn threatened to walk away for good, and she has too many connections and supporters for the heads to let her go when they could stop her.

Most of Angel and Dawn is focused on the fight, and Dawn figures that's an always and ever thing for both of them.

They come as a pair, and they teach and they mentor and they guide and they counsel. They're victorious and they're defeated, and they save and they lose. They make judgment calls, and they get it right more often than not. They teach the Slayers that they know won't fit into the black/white strictures of Council work the varying shades of gray.

The only thing they never do is wonder why they're fighting, what the purpose is.

The only thing they always do is wonder how much more they can take.

Sometimes the answer is, no more, and that's when they go on sabbatical, as the Council has come to call it. Trips to normalcy and calm that never last nearly as long as they guess beforehand.

Dawn jokes about the two of them being brainwashed except that it's their consciences that have been programmed.

She'd resent it and rebel if she wasn't so consciencewashed.

Life seems like a circle to Dawn, rather than the straight line she used to think it was, and hers starts and ends at Angel. Which makes it seem as though her life revolves around him, but that's not the case. She always makes her way back to him and starts off from him again. Rather often, because the circle isn't all that big.

He's the constant in a life that is a confusing cycle of headquarters and Slayers and Council members and apocalypses. Angel has become her reference point through the years. For pretty much everything. Things tie back to him, she comes back to him over and over, and starts from him over and over, because he's infused in every part of her life. Because they're both infused into every part of each other's lives.

They have one life, in a way. They each progress on their own path, but the paths are like one circle set on top of another. Angel and Dawn. Always just an arm's reach away from each other, because even if Angel's got a few centuries on her, it's a circle. It all comes round again and again.

It's funny that Angel is comforted by her unchanging appearance, which digs at her, while she's comforted by their overlaid circles, which digs at him because it reminds him that everything for him now is just a recycling of stuff the twelfth time over. But there's no other way it could be for him. It's all about walking the same path with different scenery, the circle over and over.

She picked that up around the time of her fourth death and Angel's still refusing to accept it.

Everyone assumes they're a couple. Dawn and Angel don't bother correcting anyone because that would just make them believe it more fiercely. But the truth of the matter is that Dawn isn't the Summers sister named Buffy, and Angel isn't the Order of Aurelis vampire named Spike.

They hate each other sometimes for that. Or maybe they always do and it just flares up and becomes noticeable every so often, cruel words about how "you shouldn't be the one alive" passing their lips and making them both hurt.

And it doesn't matter that Buffy would never have wanted these decades and the potential for centuries, and that Spike adored being human once it happened and wouldn't have wanted to give it up.

Reality isn't the point of saying the words; the point is the pain they cause each other which is never worth the aftermath of regret and guilt and apologies and promises to never say those words again.

Angel says they cling too desperately to delineation between then and now, rip each other to pieces to keep it clear. Dawn tells him it's stupid that they choose this way to delineate when they have so many other ways they can do it, and Angel says she's right.

But it doesn't stop either one of them from saying it.

Dawn's life isn't about anything other than fighting the fight, and she knows that's the worst way to go about it. There are many things her friends and family taught her, the most important being that there has to be room for more in your life. She knows it. She really does.

It's just that she can't get past the transience of everyone. Even with ever-hopeful adolescent brain chemicals in her head, she can't find a way to reconcile the loss that will always be with her and the brief, fleeting moments of connection with others.

And her life seems lonely and bare because of it, lacking in the laughter and good things she used to have. But they left her and that's what it all comes back to in this circle that is her life.

So it's her and Angel, both locked away from everyone but each other.

On good nights, they may patch up minor wounds and Angel makes Dawn something to eat. They go over details of what's happened, or just have average, normal conversation while Dawn eats her food and Angel drinks his blood. They say goodnight on the second floor landing and go to their respective rooms.

On bad nights they patch up serious wounds and sometimes wear the loss of someone very recent in their eyes. They sit in the darkened living room sipping Irish whiskey until things are dull and then they trudge upstairs and share the bed in the spare room, which has protective plastic under the sheets to keep the blood from getting to the mattress. Whoever's in better shape gets water from the bathroom and sets the glass right next to the pill bottles that are always on the bedside table.

And when they're on sabbatical they go out to dinner and movies and do everything that they can after dark in whatever city they've escaped to, both twitchy from the start to get back to their comfort zone where there's a purpose and mission for them.

It's about as normal as things can get for them, really, in this life where all the grounding humor died decades ago. All that's left are a vampire and a Key forever walking in circles with too-solemn hearts and hazy wisps of hatred and insanity in them that they force into corpulence every so often because they don't know what else to do.

And it's home in its own way.

.End


End file.
